Representing and experimenting with gesture at the museum

For the MuséoCamp 2018 residency of the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie, we formed the Accolab collective, led by Tallulah Frappier and Coralie Retureau.

At the Carrefour numérique², we developed the Gestographie project as part of its Living Lab approach. Over a year, we designed and built several experimental set-ups that tried to picture what a museum of gesture might be. Le Gestomaton filmed the gestures people make while getting ready to be photographed. Mime-moi une fusée recorded and archived visitors' mimes based on a word they were given. The L'objet comme instrument workshops invited people to make music with everyday objects.

For our last production, Au coin du feu, l'histoire d'un geste (By the fire, the story of a gesture), we invited visitors to reproduce the gestures used to light a fire today and to find what links them to older techniques. The video shows its presentation to the public, the set-up in action and how it was built. It also gives an idea of how we worked throughout the residency, making prototypes and trying them out with visitors.